4Wall DC Supplies Vari-Lite BeamWashes for M3 Festival

Lighting Designer Mike Lurz recently turned to 4Wall DC for new Vari-Lite VL4000 BeamWash fixtures, as well as VL4000 Spots. Needing to make his M3 Rock Festival rig look layered and complex, Lurz chose the BeamWash for its versatility and washbeam-shaft trinity of effects. Lurz explained the rig to Bryan Matthews of Vari-Lite:

"I've been involved with the M3 Rock Festival since 2009 and putting the design together for this type of event is actually two parts," began Lurz. "First, we use the Merriweather Pavilion house rig to give the bands as many lighting options as possible with profile and wash fixtures, colors, patterns etc. Then, for this particular genre of music, we need to look at providing a lot of contrast and movement to make the rig look big through the layering of beams. To accomplish this, versatility in your lighting instruments is essential and that's where the VL4000 BeamWash and VL4000 Spot luminaires truely excel."

As Lurz began to put together his final lighting plot that would encompass the lighting needs of 20 Heavy Metal bands over the two day festival, he knew that he needed a fixture that could truly tie the whole rig together. It was 4Wall Entertainment Lighting who came up with the ideal solution.

He continued, "The whole event really came together through the hard work of Merriweather house lighting director Len Applefeld and 4Wall when they informed me we could get VL4000 BeamWash luminaires for the run of the festival. Once I found this out, I went online to research all I could about the new lights which made me even more excited due to the triple functionality of the VL4000 BeamWash.

"The thing that really impressed me most about the VL4000 BeamWash was when we used them for Queensryche playing Silent Lucidity," admitted Lurz. "During this song, I brought in a gobo pattern with no color onto a stage that was saturated in LED blue and the optics of the VL4000 BeamWash punched right through it all. Then as the song played on, I quickly changed the optics from Shaft mode where the gobo was tiny, and moved into Wash mode for a large gobo spread, then we came back into Beam mode for a spot special. It was an extremely fluid movement and it's so rare in lighting, that I really don't even know how to explain it. You really just have to see it for yourself."